THE MUDDY WATERS OF E-SERVICES – The Use and Misuse of the Concept and How to Get Out of the Maze Arild Jansen, Section for eGovernment, University of Oslo, Norway, arildj@jus.uio.no, Svein Ølnes, Vestlandsforsking (Western Norway Research Centre), Norway, sol@vestforsk.no Abstract Electronic services or e-services are key concept in e-Government. The availability and quality of elec- tronic services are important indicators of e-Government maturity. However, we question whether all types of electronic interactions between citizens and government agencies really are e-services. We argue that our understanding of this concept is inadequate. It creates problems when building ontologies and makes it difficult to achieve better interoperability between systems. We thus propose a framework for categorizing services using some basic terms. In this way we can describe and model various types of communication with between citizens and public agencies based on a consistent set of elementary func- tions. As an illustration of the usefulness of our framework, we describe some of the basic services in the EU e-government Benchmark Measurement in terms of our vocabulary. Keywords: service, e-service, e-Government, interoperability, semantic web 1 INTRODUCTION The service concept is widely used but is involving much confusion. E-service is even worse; it is under- stood as almost all types of electronic communication between citizens and government. However, is the government offering us a “service” when we are paying taxes or a fine, just because we are using the I n- ternet? In the rather vague terminology used within the e-Government field, almost all types of interaction between public authorities and citizens are regarded as services. Such confusions create difficulties also when defining ontologies that shall support electronic provision of services. Goldkuhl (2007) questions the use of service in all Governmental tasks, while Alter (2008) points to the different definitions of ser- vice cross communities, and Baida et al. (2004) propose an ontology for describing services and service bundling. A public service can be solely the electronic communication between a public agency and a user, as e.g. information provision, completing an application form etc., or it may be one part of a longer interaction sequence that also includes the provision of a physical service (e.g. applying for child care). The interac- tion may have been initiated by a user in order to obtain some value (good, benefit etc), or it may be to fulfil a responsibility where we are obliged to provide information, e.g. when paying taxes, reporting var- ious types of information to public authorities, etc. An electronic interaction can replace a former paper- based communication, or it can involve an “exclusive” new type of service, where the content in itself has a separate, original value, as e.g. an interactive digital map, an electronic book from the library etc. What is called an e-service can also include a set of separate interactions including case handling, as is illustrat- ed in the example of the Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund in chapter 3. On the other hand, public sector has also many functions which imply electronic interactions that should not qualify as services, as e.g. mandatory collection of information from businesses. The aim of this paper is to describe and understand these different types of communication and interac- tion patterns taking place when an agency provides “e-services” to its various stakeholders. We argue that it is important to be more specific when describing both the purpose of an interaction, the type and con- tent of the interaction, and the results of the interaction, for several reasons: